Books: Dot Ole Davil Voodoo

THE CROSS OF BARON SAMEDI (502 pp.)Richard DohrmanHoughton Miff I
In ($4.50).

This is a promising first novel that breaks a lot of its promises. It
promises a richly informative account of voodoo and the Haitian mind
and temper, but much of it is just tom-tommyrot. It promises
distinction of thought, but a jungle growth of involuted sentences
often chokes meaning in mannerism. It promises a clash between the life
of instinct and the life-in-death of inhibition, but the conflict is
reduced to a kind of nagging suburbanality about a dissatisfied wife.
Still,...